Advanced SQL Tutorial and MySQL Performance Workshop

Tuesday morning I stopped by a few minutes of Joe Celko's Advanced SQL Tutorial. Joe has an amazing knowledge of the SQL language, no doubt. Lots of arcane knowledge and references to "when we had the discussions in the SQL committee we did discuss that". But the tutorial was a bit too DBAish for me. By that I mean too much "this is how data should be neat" rather than "this is how you solve real business problems". While I was in there he was talking about not inventing new ids for something that already have standard IDs. For example vehicles have VINs, so you shouldn't invent your own primary keys. The pragmatic programmer in me screamed "but what when you need to add a record for a vehicle you don't have a VIN for yet" (insurance agent adding a new car to a quote so the customer can just call with the VIN to finish it up later or whatever). Anyway, so after seeing that kind of thing a few more times I left.

In the afternoon I stopped by Jeremy Zawodny's MySQL Performance Workshop. Lots of good, even great, tips and hints on things to do to test and improve MySQL performance. But alas, in the time I was in there I didn't pick up anything I didn't already know. (I've used MySQL for how many years now? 7? Is that even possible?)